SwingingTheLamp
@SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
- Comment on Over 20M 'people' listed as 100+ years old in the SS database? 2 days ago:
I feel like Betteridge’s Law of Headlines applies here, too. If Leon had found fire (fraudulent benefits), he would have posted fire instead of smoke.
- Comment on Good morning. 2 days ago:
Borrowing is not an option?
- Comment on In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico 1 week ago:
Honestly, I think that we the people need to assert our own right to name things more often. I don’t recall the latest name of the Brewers stadium in Milwaukee, for example. Whatever company that paid to have them put its name on the front didn’t pay me. It’s “the new County Stadium” as far as I’m concerned.
(I have no philosophical objection to the name, by the way. Reps of the new company can DM me, we can work out a deal.)
- Comment on YSK: There's a protest today at noon at your state capitol. 1 week ago:
It’s going to take sustained effort over time, so… don’t start? I’m struggling to find the logic here.
- Comment on YSK: There's a protest today at noon at your state capitol. 1 week ago:
Haha, that happened in 2011 with the Wisconsin Act 10 protests. It was literally the most peaceful thing you ever saw in your life: singing, chanting, mutual aid stations, pizza, people on their goddamn hands and knees cleaning salt and sand off of the floor of the Capitol in the evenings.
And the Republicans were cowering in pants-shitting terror! (I mean, more than their usual.) The governor would enter the Capitol through the utility tunnel from a nearby state building. One legislator was terrorized by scratches on their car, and got the State Patrol to investigate the attack. (The SP concluded that the perpetrator was a stone kicked up by the wheels.) I know people who got arrested for having cameras in the Assembly chamber.
Bunch of craven idiots, the lot.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Compare the situation to all the noise and outrage, but nobody shows up.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
And what will not doing it accomplish?
- Comment on Equal under the law or something 1 month ago:
Does it need another purpose?
- Comment on The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful 2 months ago:
Seems like the author could’ve cited plenty of examples, then, but just didn’t?
- Comment on The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful 2 months ago:
With that title, I was expecting that the author could name more than 3 alleged smears from long ago.
- Comment on Coming on Lemmy and complaining because there are too many Linux users is like going in to a brothel and complaining that there are too many hookers 3 months ago:
That really hurt the elephant’s feelings to be always singled out, so no wonder.
- Comment on Trying to reverse climate change won’t save us, scientists warn 3 months ago:
And, eliminate Euclidean zoning in the U.S., so that people can live near where they work, or work near where they live. (Not all of us can do it, or like working from home.)
- Comment on Honey 3 months ago:
Kinda tongue-in-cheek questions, but: Honey isn’t an animal body part, it isn’t produced by animal bodies, so if it is an animal product because bees process it, is wheat flour (for example) an animal product because humans process it? How about hand-kneaded bread? Does that make fruit an animal product because the bees pollinated the flowers while collecting the nectar?
- Comment on Pesto!!! 3 months ago:
But have we tried feeding a human infant 24kg of fish per week? Y’know, for science.
- Comment on US ports strike causes first shutdown in 50 years 4 months ago:
Glad to see that Pres. Biden isn’t (yet) forcing the workers back on the job this time. Perhaps he should mitigate the effects on the economy by temporarily nationalizing the ports for the 80-day negotiation period, and hiring the longshoremen to work them?
- Comment on Burning Up 5 months ago:
Tell me it’s 68f out and I will fight you.
Note to self: High heat levels make Canadians cranky.
- Comment on Burning Up 5 months ago:
Around here, 32°F is very cold in October, but an occasion to wear shorts in February. (Both are still cookout temperatures, though.)
- Comment on Burning Up 5 months ago:
No, that’s not it, we’re measuring in incredulity units, which are syllables.
“One hun-dred and se-ven?!” == 6 syllables
“For-ty one?!” == 3 syllables
Also, the first one has more vowel sounds to really draw out to indicate higher levels of I-can’t-even. It sounds only golly-jeepers in Celsius, and much more I’m-so-done-with-this-shit in Fahrenheit.
- Comment on It's called a wedding ring, but surely it should be called a marriage ring 5 months ago:
Reminds me of an old Yakov Smirnoff routine. Espresso powder makes espresso, and milk powder makes milk. So what does baby powder make?
- Comment on How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way? 5 months ago:
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (places) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a free second at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.
Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.
- Comment on Hail our true supreme leader 5 months ago:
The arms in the second image are much too short. I can’t unsee it, now that I’ve noticed.
- Comment on What has he done to deserve this? 6 months ago:
Question: I know that Celsius is one of the accepted SI units, but is it really metric? (SI includes a number of definitely non-metric units.) And, if being expressed as a decimal number is enough to qualify it as metric, then isn’t the Fahrenheit scale also metric? It is also decimalized, and also defined in terms of the SI unit (Kelvin).
- Comment on If malls continue to shut down and decay over the next twenty years, someone should turn them into retirement communities for GenX and Millennials. 6 months ago:
Ha, I thought that the blatant contradiction about having too much space and therefore not enough space would make the joke obvious, but I guess not.
Also, a Canyonero isn’t a real vehicle. It was a joke from The Simpsons.
- Comment on If malls continue to shut down and decay over the next twenty years, someone should turn them into retirement communities for GenX and Millennials. 6 months ago:
Yes, that’s what Europeans don’t understand about America. When we go to, say, Wal Mart, there’s only one. We have to go to Bentonville, AR. Not so bad for us here in the Midwest, but the residents of Alaska have it particularly tough. And since you go to Wal Mart to pick up milk, we can’t go by public transport. It has to be by car, or better yet, drive the Canyonero. (No train schedule can predict when the milk runs out!)
The country is so big, and we have so much empty land, there’s just simply no room to build more stores near where people live. What kind of madness would that be?!
- Comment on Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term? 8 months ago:
Right, which is why I’ve been saying that the Democrats should restore the filibuster. What they have now is not a filibuster, in practice, it’s more akin to an administrative hold. One Senator indicates an intent to filibuster via email, and they move on to other business.
Make 'em do it. Pick a popular issue, and lean into it. Make the Republicans actually stand up there at the podium and talk for hours. Get them on camera on the news every night as obstructionists, blocking the will of the people. Yes, it will waste Senate session time; that’s a perfect opportunity for all of the Democrats to roast them non-stop to reporters. It’ll be painful for a while, but at least has a chance of breaking the log jam. (And if the GQP doesn’t take the bait, hey, popular thing gets passed!)
- Comment on It’s not impossible for someone to have heard about assguard, looked it up, and then realized it’s “Asgard”. 9 months ago:
What, do you have assburgers syndrome?
- Comment on May 13, 1985 9 months ago:
That’s possible, but that doesn’t explain the same feeling about the Ruby Ridge incident.
- Comment on May 13, 1985 9 months ago:
And yet the Waco siege is still a rallying cry for anti-government groups accusing the FBI and DEA of unjust, violent overreaction, while the MOVE bombing is not. Huh, I wonder what the difference is? /s
- Comment on May 13, 1985 9 months ago:
I see a cult with a fortified compound and armed soldiers, with multiple missed paroles and a history of armed violence going back over a decade. If they’re not terrorist then what the fuck are they?
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 9 months ago:
I haven’t read all of the replies to see if somebody else had said this, but it’s because the Internet was designed to be completely decentralized, whereas the phone system requires your line or device to be registered with the network operator(s). Any device that can get a valid Internet address for the local network can communicate with the whole Internet, but a phone will only work if it’s explicitly known by the phone service provider, and that information shared to all providers.
We could set up a system, layered on top of the Internet, by which each computer could register itself in a central directory each time it connects, and thus be reachable at the same address no matter where it connects, even on a NAT connection. In fact, it’s easy to do with a VPN and Dynamic DNS (both of which require the cooperation some centralized authority). It’s just not universal, because, well, what’s the utility of doing so?